The Division is the most played non-Valve game on Steam, despite not requiring it

We've already heard about how The Division is Ubisoft's best selling game of all time over the first 24 hours, likely making it one of the best new IPs ever too. But specifically on PC, the tracking tools hooked into Steam let us see that it's doing remarkably well for keeping players occupied too, while allowing comparisons to other massive games. Let's take a look.

First up, a glance at the official Steam stats page will tell you that The Division is handily in third place, behind only the Valve titans of Dota 2 and CS:GO. At this very moment it has over 92,000 players and rising as the Americans wake up and the Europeans get home from work for a weekend's hard apocalypsing. That's also today's peak, and it looks likely to hit six figures.

Beating out all other non-Valve games should be expected of the big triple-A titles on release, particularly those with the amount of marketing pressure that The Division has had and its multiplayer focus. However, when you consider the major split between those using Steam, and those who bought on uPlay and bypassed Valve's service entirely - as my copy does - it's even more impressive.

SteamCharts shows the game has maintained that number of players pretty much constantly since release. Compare it to another recent Ubisoft release, Far Cry: Primal, and the difference is palpable - The Division around 80k ahead. However, look at Fallout 4, one of the biggest releases of last year, and you see there's a lot further up it can go. This is where the uPlay interruption means we can't tell exactly how good it has done compared to others, but there's further speculation we can make.

Fallout 4 likely had a PC boost from the promise of mods. The Division's multiplayer focus, meanwhile, pushes people towards the consoles their friends own. I'd say it's fairly obvious that Fallout 4 has done better than The Division overall, but it's likely a lot closer than SteamCharts makes it look. Given Fallout 4 was a massive success for everyone involved, that's a very good situation for a new IP with a weird mix of genres like The Division to be in.

does THE DIVISION on steam actually download from steam? because I have a free copy of the game from my graphics card I bought, and I have to use Uplay to download it, however UPLAY won't download the game